We have some scheduled maintenance for tomorrow, May 2nd. This maintenance will include the release of MilkyWay@home Separation version 1.46 as well as an update to our server code to support this new application version. If everything goes well we expect everything to be up and running within a half hour. If there are issues, I will be troubleshooting them until they are fixed.

I will make a new post tomorrow at the conclusion of the update and maintenance where you should post any issues you see.

Jake W.

[Edit]

Took down old runs to prepare for the new update. This should prevent seeing a bunch of errors when the new application comes out. Waiting on the work queue to clear out a bit before the new release.

Added a model for the Milky Way disk to the applications density models. This introduces 1 new parameter for optimization to our set of 20 parameters.
- Context: We have been struggling to get our application to find all three streams we know are present in our data set. The problem seems to be due to the tendency for the streams to instead be used to fit a the background instead of the substructure. As a result, we explored a few different options for why our background model is not adequate to account for the background in the data. We found that we can expect up to a ~10% contamination of Milky Way disk stars in certain areas of our sample. We now account for this in our model.

We fixed the background scale length parameter to match literature values removing 1 of the now 21 parameters. This has us back to fitting 20 parameters.
- Context: After some investigation into the reason our background model was incapable of fitting the the data, we investigated using different background models such as the Broken Power Law which we have implemented or an Einasto profile. Our investigation showed very little difference in these models and that varying the scale length in our current model did not change the overall shape of the model much. As a result we decided to fix the value of this scale length to something realistic based on literature values and previous results. This allowed us to remove one parameter from our fits.

Application completion percentage now goes from 0% to 100% only once.
- Context: When workunit bundling was first implemented, the workunit completion percentage would go from 0% to 100% once for each workunit in a bundle. Now we have fixed it to count from 0% to 100% only once regardless how many workunits are bundled together.

Credit Update to reflect longer workunit times.
- Context: Adding the disk model increased the run time of the application slightly. You should see an increase in credits per workunit to reflect this.

Update to the server to allow for optimizing the our new disk parameter.
- Context: Adding this new parameter for the weight of the disk relative to the background required modifications to the parameter file. This means that the server had to be updated to be able to read and write these new parameter files.

Mac OSX Support.
- Context: Our Mac which we previously used for building our Mac applications died a few months back. We now finally have access to another Mac and are in the process of getting it ready to build our applications for us. We should have a Mac application built and ready for our release by tomorrow.

This update has been in the works for several months. It is a big update and has been a lot of work. If you have any questions about the changes in this new version please let me know.

There are still 250,000 work units out in progress. Some of the slower machines are taking their time clearing their work queues. I'll probably leave the project off for the night and push the update tomorrow around noon after my final exam.

There are still 250,000 work units out in progress. Some of the slower machines are taking their time clearing their work queues. I'll probably leave the project off for the night and push the update tomorrow around noon after my final exam.

Jake W.

Hi Jake,

The project status page seems to be stuck at 2 May 2017, 20:43:39 UTC ...

No problem leaving the project off for the night to me; I shifted the GPU to another project, so it's busy and already doing other jobs.

Leave the server for what it is and prepare for what is more important; you're final exam!
Good luck!

Aad.

{edit}I see the project status now is at 2 May 2017, 21:43:55 UTC, so I guess it is updating once/hour.